An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I took Amtrak down to Philadelphia and arrived there in 90 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to go from Coney Island to MoMA by subway. I was celebrating my last few days of Spring Break, my terminal lust for abstraction, and the lifelong friendship with two artists, Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg, exhibiting together at Larry Becker Contemporary Art in a show titled “between earth and sky.”
Contributed by David Carrier / Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), who was born in Washington County, New York, and spent much of her adult life in Virginia before returning to upstate New York, has long been famous. The first American celebrity artist, she appeared on the covers of Life and Time and was portrayed as a celebrity in Norman Rockwell’s painting Christmas Homecoming (1948), which is included in the exhibition of her work currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Most people my age have seen reproductions of her artworks.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The 2026 Whitney Biennial is rightly dialed into the world’s abundant strife, most of the selected artists witnessing and declaring it through materials, context, or concept. Ali Eyal, with his knockout of an oil painting Look Where I Took You – arguably the jewel of the exhibition – takes an exceptionally straight-up approach via content. Composed from the memory of a Baghdad amusement park he and his sister visited before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was nine, the piece spans the strategic arc of the twenty-first century with improbable lyricism while bravely carrying its immense geopolitical freight.
Contributed by Adam Simon / If I had walked into Kerry Schuss Gallery knowing nothing about the two artists on display, I would have thought the pairing unusual, elegant, and extremely interesting. One group of works consists of Michael Maul’s 11 x 8.5-inch ballpoint pen and colored pencil drawings on ledger paper depicting row after row of almost identical figures, rendered in a diagrammatic shorthand. Interspersed among these, are four 20 x 24-inch photographs of books taken by Tim Maul. The photographs are one of a kind Cibachromes, produced by printing directly from 35-millimeter slides; the method was discontinued in 2013. Cibachromes are long-lasting photographs of exceptionally vivid colors. All four of the photographs were shot in the 1990s but not printed until 2000. Two depict books open to what appear to be the blank pages preceding the title page. A third book is similarly splayed but face-down. The fourth photograph is of a shelf of books that appear to be journals or compiled records with dates on the spines ranging from 1859 to 1863, shot on commission at a library in Ireland.
Contributed by Bill Arning / The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill presents a conspicuous curatorial challenge. It no longer owns any of Cole’s major paintings and relies heavily on devoted visitors remembering his masterpieces sufficiently that encountering the rooms where they were conceived will hold interest. Given this, its single-artist focus, and fixed historical narrative, the museum also often invites contemporary artists to enliven the experience it offers. This approach can fail because if the living artist is reduced to little more than an interpretive prompt to appreciating a familiar figure. But Valerie Hegarty, with her devotion to an aesthetic of destruction infused with autobiographical trauma, is a truly provocative foil for the works of Emily Cole, Thomas Cole’s daughter.
Contributed by Peter Dudek / I was on my way to ISAW – NYU’s Institute of Studies in the Ancient World – when an email from The New Yorker appeared on my iPhone. They had just published a story entitled “Love is a Mental Hospital.” A terribly precise and painful title for structurally confining relationships; often by one’s own choosing. Have we not all been there? And what about life as an artist? Is that not also an entanglement of rapture, love, hate, and malaise? Believing I understood the situation deeply, I wondered if reading the story was necessary. But could there not be a different take, a new perspective? Why not? I returned to the email and, of course, the title was not “Love is a Mental Hospital” but rather “Love in a Mental Hospital.” A story about…
Contributed by Lucas Moran / “Always Were” is the title of Opal Mae Ong’s solo show at Plato Gallery. It’s a compact declaration – two words that look both forward and back. The work does the same. Old ways, rituals, medicines, and inherited knowledge blur into future or parallel worlds: gradient skies without brushstrokes, glowing plants, and figures who bathe, offer, watch, and mourn. Grief is a constant presence here – not as melodrama but as a condition with the same dignity and value as joy or love. Ong treats all of it as coexistent. Nothing replaces anything.
Contributed by Patrick Ryan Bell / Tucked away in a cul-de-sac on Attorney Street in the Lower East Side and committed to ambitious exhibitions, Frisson […]
Contributed by Jac Lahav / Timothée Chalamet, the 30-year old actor, recently rage-baited internet audiences by saying he wouldn’t want to work in “ballet or […]
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Reading Gary Garrels’ remembrance of Brice Marden in Artforum in 2023, I encountered a Rothko quote to the effect that paintings are about basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. I was not inclined to think about my work in that way, so I spent some time reading about basic human emotions, which, in my placid New England family, were generally dismissed without much examination….
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” an article that recently appeared in the winter issue of October, artist Josh Kline points out that art has long been curated, funded, and institutionalized by the very galleries and collectors who profit from it and the schools that train its participants, without necessarily serving the majority of artists. Most NYC artists are familiar with the story Josh is telling, as many have weathered previous market downturns. Some can remember the 1989 stock market crash, the devastation of 9/11, and the 2008 recession. Now, after what has become a years-long rout, even A-listers like Josh feel compelled to rethink the cost of maintaining a NYC studio as the market for their work has changed.
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / Every month, it seems there is one day when there are so many openings and events in the Hudson Valley that it is physically impossible to attend them all. For upstate art lovers, this challenging experience is happening twice, on both Saturday, April 4 and Saturday, April 11. The first Saturday in April brings new exhibitions at SEPTEMBER, Philip Douglas Fine Art, Front Room Gallery, Jane Street Art Center, Headstone…
Contributed by Peter Schroth / Barbara Takenaga’s current exhibition at DC Moore, “Parallax,” picks up from her 2024 exhibit “Whatsis” and continues an arc roughly twenty years in the making. The works are acrylic on canvas and panel and range from diminutive rectangles to monumental multi-paneled pieces.Takenaga iterates her signature techniques of pouring and handwork seamlessly, in a lead-and-follow approach that balances randomness, intuition, and calculation.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Figuration, transformation, and materiality are on display at Turn Gallery in the group show “We Are Parts.” The work of Lily Rose Fine, Olivia Springberg, C Lucy Whitehead, and Caroline Zurmely nods gracefully to fragmentary bodies and mementos of the deceptively carefree 1990s aesthetic, vaulting dated, picayune fashion into collective memory and saving it from dissolution into the vast sea of pedestrian art.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In April, Two Coats of Paint welcomes resident artist Dale Emmart. Her work reflects a sustained and expansive meditation on rope — in oil, ink on washi, woodcut, and artist books. For her, it is a widely evocative pictorial object owing to its sheer versatility. Essentially unchanged since the Egyptians first documented ropemaking in 4000 BCE, it admits of a remarkable range of associations: industriousness and energy, lethargy and repose, entanglement and freedom.
Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: Meaningfully minimalGrandma Moses’s simple worldAt the Whitney Biennial: Ali Ayal’s mirthless amusement parkMichael and Tim Maul: Art as antidote and refugeValerie Hegarty: Enlivening Emily Cole
Rodin and foodOpal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing inEcho Yan and Cass Yao: An unsettled awarenessOutsider Art Fair 2026: Hunters and preySharon’s Substack / April 1, 2026NYC Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, April 2026
